All The Way Down

Chapter 29

I sat in the car and flipped through the pictures, trying to find anything I'd missed the first couple of times I'd looked at them. I started the engine and turned the air conditioning on. It was too hot to wait with the windows down.

A couple of minutes later Michelle tapped on the window of my door, startling me. I reached across and pulled the handle to open the latch on her door. She came around to the passenger side and climbed in. I handed her the pictures and watched her face as she flipped through them, looking at the pictures intently. I tried to read the expression on her face. Finally she handed the pictures back to me.

"It could be one of two things, Del. Either it's illegal immigrants or it's a mule train."

"What's a mule train?" I asked.

She pointed at the picture of the men milling around the truck. "See the backpacks and bags?" she said. "Maybe they're full of cocaine, heroin, who knows? The border patrol has caught enough people trying to bring big loads in trucks and cars that now the drug dealers have groups of men carry the stuff across the border through the desert. They call them mule trains. Immigration and D.E.A. don't look in the desert as hard as other places."

Something clicked in my mind. I thought of the immigration roadblock.

"They're riding in the quarry trucks to bypass the immigration roadblocks and the city," I said. "Once they get to the other side of the city, they're past all the checkpoints."

She nodded. "It looks like it to me. Del, these people will kill you if you get in their way. The border patrol finds bodies along the border sometimes. It’s not a joke." I heard her, but I wasn’t listening.

"Can you tell where these were taken?" I asked.

She went through the pictures again, slowly.

"I'd say about three miles west of here on the north side of the highway. I think this background here is the San Andres range, that mountain over there." She pointed at the huge range that bordered the Western edge of the White Sands missile range. "Are you going out there to look around?" she asked.

"I'm thinking about it."

"What would you look for?"

"I don't know," I said. "Whatever Brick was looking for."  She nodded, understanding. We were silent for a few seconds.

"I don't know what to tell you, Del. I know you don't want to back off, but these people will kill you if they know you're watching them or looking for them. You could wind up like Brick."

I didn't say anything. I felt something hardening in my gut like cold rocks. She looked at her lap and shook her head slowly. "I need to be with Rosalie tonight. Will you come to dinner at my house?"

"What time?"

"Six thirty."

"Six thirty it is."

I leaned across the console towards her and we kissed, but she felt tentative and remote to me. She pulled away and I could see a single tear on her cheek.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I just have the feeling that I'm going to lose you, too," she said. Then she got out of the car and walked back towards the building.